The Wingmen, page 8
For precautionary measures, the medical staff rushed Williams to the base’s infirmary. Major Hollenbeck made sure to check in on his wingman and noted he was “a bit pale but calm.” Other than a twisted ankle from instinctively slamming his feet repeatedly on the useless rudder and brake pedals, Williams was unscathed. But not undisturbed.
Eventually Air Force, as well as Army personnel who happened to be there that day, learned the identity of the pilot. Inside K-13’s weather station and the mess hall hit by a piece of his plane that afternoon, Williams signed autographs and posed for pictures in his freshly singed flight suit.
Airman Joseph V. Giaimo, Jr., was working at K-13’s weather station when Williams’s scorching plane fell from the sky. About an hour later, Williams walked by his desk. Out of pure instinct and excitement the twenty-one-year-old Giaimo rose to his feet, grabbed Williams’s hand, and said, “Glad to meet you, Ted!” Airman Second Class Dan Moody, the starting quarterback at Centre College when drafted into the Air Force two years earlier, also jumped at the chance to meet the ballplayer who had appeared on the cover of Life magazine at the age of twenty-one.
“We were ready to haul out a dead pilot but he jumped clear before the plane stopped sliding,” Moody, a would-be college senior, wrote home. “We watched the plane burn and then had chow with Ted. . . . He seemed like a good guy and must be as good a pilot as he is a ball player.”
For a pair of young enlisted men such as Giaimo and Moody to be so starstruck was understandable. A senior Air Force officer was a bit more surprising.
First Lieutenant Woody Woodbury, a member of VMF-115, flew on that morning’s mission to Kyomipo. Like Hawkins and Hollenbeck, Woodbury noticed Williams’s plane in distress and joined the convoy escorting him to the nearest airfield. Running low on fuel, Woodbury landed safely at K-13 and saw Williams’s “wheels up” landing. From the runway, Woodbury witnessed an even stranger scene than the fiery crash landing. As Ted Williams ran from the wreck, a green Plymouth, a staff car, approached him. A colonel leapt out. Williams saluted his superior, who saluted right back, then handed him a piece of paper.
A few days later, Woodbury asked Williams, “Why’d the colonel hand you the paper?”
“I just got my ass blown off,” he answered. “I’m fucken lucky to be here. And this guy asked me for my fucken autograph!”
Half-a-world removed from Boston and caked in smoke, Ted Williams still could not escape his fans.
American newspapers from coast to coast carried the story of Williams’s crash. Letters from pilots to their families back in the States, albeit days if not weeks later, did as well. Hours after Williams returned to K-3, John Glenn wrote to Annie, “Ted Williams had a deal today.... Guys with him seem to think he was more than somewhat lucky. Not a scratch but plane was a total strike. He’s back here tonight. May as well tell you because you’ll read it all, undoubtedly in a few days.”
In some cities, television reports beat the morning editions: Doris Williams first learned of her husband’s near-death experience when Bobby-Jo ran to her yelling, “Mommy, Mommy, there’s something about Daddy on TV!”
At K-13, not long after the crash, Williams and his fellow officers sat for a debriefing of the events that occurred on Mission Number 3301. He then hopped aboard a R4D transport plane for a return to K-3—the other MAG-33 pilots refueled their Panthers and flew back—where he endured another lengthy debriefing with the executive and commanding officers until dark.
Certainly, Williams had been fortunate his plane didn’t break in half or explode, either when first hit, when fire erupted near the compressed air inside his engine, or when he slammed into then steamed across the K-13 runway for more than a mile. But his own mistake, the result of his combat inexperience, had caused his Panther to take on fire in the first place.
Over the years, both Williams and lionizing journalists would offer several different justifications for flying too closely to Major Hollenbeck and too close to the ground. Author Glenn Infield attributed the error to disorientation and pain in his head caused by the intense physical pressure inside the cockpit. In his autobiography, Williams explained that he simply “lost visual reference” with Hollenbeck. Years later, Williams even suggested that Hollenbeck was to blame, saying “as we were going down, I was startled to see the guy ahead of me starting to jinx [zigzag]. You weren’t supposed to do that until you were coming out of your dive. I’m going straight for the target so naturally I’m closing in on him. So I have to start jinxing while I’m looking for a feasible target. We were told to drop our bombs from 2,000 feet, but we never did. We’d usually go lower than that, and this time I’d gone a lot lower.”
Whatever the reason, Williams, his superiors, and his fellow pilots recognized that Williams had been at fault. Immediately upon exiting the plane, Williams was livid, mostly at himself, and smashed his helmet on the ground.
“I followed the guy in front of me too closely going in on the run,” he admitted that summer.
Still, other members of 311 didn’t blame Williams. Pinky Hollenbeck told a reporter the very next day that “for a comparatively green pilot over here, Williams must have done everything right.... He made the greatest play of his career.”
The higher-ups at K-3 didn’t hold the crash against him either.
MAG-33’s official Type-B Report (or Command Diary) for the month of February 1953 detailed some of the fun the group had at Williams’s expense. Designed by the Intelligence Section and reproduced by VMJ-1 photo squadron, paper cards were printed as proof of membership in the newest fraternity at K-3, the “Hole in One Club.” The day after his Panther survived dozens of enemy shells, in addition to a flaming, wheels-up landing, “Captain Ted Williams became the charter member” of the Hole in One Club.
The card that he received featured a cartoon golfer striking a ball that pierced the wing of a nearby jet then clunked the pilot (wearing a tam-o’-shanter rather than a helmet) on the head. Above a putting green labeled “K-3,” the card read:
THIS IS TO CERTIFY THAT Capt. T.S. Williams WHILE PLAYING ON A STRANGE COURSE, THE NORTH KOREAN COUNTRY CLUB, SCORED A “HOLE-IN-ONE” ON 16 February 1953 BY PICKING UP A ‘SUKOSHI HOLE’ FROM . . . ? FROM ENEMY GROUND FIRE!
SIGNED LB Robertshaw
COL. USMC
But Williams’s Hole in One Club card had been just the first in a batch printed and held in reserve for the next pilot to be shot up. In time, several hung for all to see on the wall of one of the Quonset huts frequently populated by officers in 115 and 311. Within a few weeks, John Glenn’s Hole in One Club card would be posted near Williams’s.
As the chaos surrounding Williams’s crash began to die down Major Glenn completed the first of his five fam hops. Toward the end of February, the assistant operations officer assigned himself to his first combat mission, a successful bombing of railroad tracks near the Haeju Peninsula.
“Pretty easy hop,” he told Annie. “Dropped 2 1000-pounders each, which leaves a rather neat hole in the area. I suppose it’s considered unethical in the better circles to enjoy such things, but I had a fine time. As you know, this combat stuff appeals to me more than just somewhat, so I guess I’m either overboard on the Marine Corps attitude or something, anyway, I’m enjoying myself thoroughly.”
Four days later, on another railroad bridge cut twenty-five miles south of Pyongyang, Glenn flew on the wing of Major Thomas Cushman. Following Cushman’s lead, Glenn unloaded two thousand-pound GPs precisely on target.
“Just want to keep my batting average now and I’ll be OK,” he told Annie.
Over the next month, Glenn carried out more than three dozen combat missions. Several of them were assisting ground forces on close air support missions, which provided Glenn a sense of achievement but also tremendous purpose. During a CAS on the evening of March 13, Glenn delivered a direct hit to a series of caves sheltering enemy troops in direct combat with First MAW troops on the ground.
“It gives me the biggest thrill in the world to have a hop that really helps out the Marines on the lines,” he told Annie.
But the bulk of Glenn’s hops over this time were IDs, Blow and Gos of roads, bridges, and enemy weapons facilities. The bombings he completed with near perfection; the exits, on several of the missions, he completed with near disaster.
On Glenn’s tenth mission, 311 and 115 joined up for another large-scale interdiction, similar to the attack on Kyomipo. From K-3, twenty-four planes crossed the resistance line to a spot north of Pyongyang. Over an array of targets, including bunkers, troop shelters, and a possible command post, MAG-33 dropped a total of 172 GPs. During the mission, Glenn’s horizontal stabilizer was struck by small arms fire. At no point did he lose control of the Panther, or struggle to return to base, but “my first genuine People’s Communist Army-type flak” earned Glenn a Hole in One Club membership, one that he would renew multiple times over the next month.
Taking on flak was common even for battle-hardened combat pilots. Weeks earlier, twenty-nine-year-old Captain William Armagost, who had already flown thirty-three combat missions for 311, suffered considerable injuries when small arms hit the underside of his Panther, igniting a fire in the cockpit.
But Glenn’s small arms encounter was different, and not simply because he had spent eight months dive-bombing Japanese-held atolls during World War II then become a career Marine who monitored the skies over a fledgling Communist revolution in China.
Major Julian Craigmiles, who served beside Glenn in the Marshall Islands then reconnected with his friend as part of MAG-33, noticed he had become “more willing to take chances.” Rather than blow and go, Glenn developed the habit of dropping his GPs or napalm, pulling off the target, and circling back around to assess the damage, locate additional targets, or pick off enemy combatants on the ground with his 20 mm cannons.
This exasperated whichever 311 pilot Glenn assigned as his wingman on such missions.
“You didn’t want to be on Glenn’s wing,” Lieutenant Rudy said. “You had to follow your leader on the bombing runs and the whole bit. Normally what you did was you peeled off at twenty-eight thousand feet or whatever and came whistling down to drop your thousand-pounders and five-hundred-pound bombs or whatever you were carrying, or you ran in low right on the ground practically if you had napalm.
“But if you were with John Glenn . . . he goes in and drops his bombs and you were behind him and you dropped your bombs on the same basic target. And then you’ve got to stay with him. All the other leaders would be headed for as high as they can get to get out of the range of the guns. And he’s down there running around through the trash cans trying to find something else to shoot at. So he’s skidding around, not very far off the ground and you’ve got to stay with him. . . . I didn’t fly his wing very often and I tried not to fly it at all.”
The squadron’s commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Ken Coss, discouraged Glenn from taking unnecessary risks. Coss told his pilots that destroying an enemy target was not more important than the life of an American pilot or his aircraft. This wasn’t about sentimentality. He stressed that if the pilot and his aircraft survived, they could be employed on more missions and attack countless targets throughout the war; if the pilot and his aircraft didn’t survive, they could not.
But the man who wrote letters to his superiors practically begging to serve in Korea “was rather intent on war-making when I went out there. I had trained for so many years for combat. I won’t say I was trying to win the war all by myself, but I took it all very, very seriously, and things such as making a second run on an anti-aircraft position, which wasn’t exactly—well, I won’t say it was foolhardy, but you put yourself in a lot of danger and you knew it.”
Even Glenn’s oldest friend in the service couldn’t get through to him.
Tom Miller, who had served by his side at Corpus Christi, El Centro, Midway, the Marshall Islands, and Quantico, was sent to Korea two months before Glenn. In December 1952, Miller was assigned to VMF-323, a squadron within MAG-12. Much to his chagrin, 323 flew Corsairs, not jets, out of K-6 near Pyeongtaek. Experienced senior officers with Corsair training had become hard to find, and Miller grudgingly accepted his post with 323. Glenn breathed a great sigh of relief when he escaped the same type of assignment.
As part of MAG-12, Miller’s squadron had flown dozens of attack missions over North Korea, including the bombing near Kyomipo that Ted Williams barely survived. That winter, Miller visited Glenn at K-3. Apart from exchanging news about their wives and young children, the two discussed business. Miller provided some advice to his friend.
“I told John that the Koreans were a hell of a lot more serious than the Japanese were in the Marshalls,” he recalled. “I know your enthusiasm. Just be careful. Don’t make two runs if you don’t have to, because you can be sure the guys on the ground are watching you and will be able to shoot more accurately at you the second time.”
Glenn didn’t listen.
On the morning of March 22, he took off from K-3, heading northwest. While Air Force B-29 Superfortresses slaughtered a network of bridges in the Sunan district of Pyongyang, Glenn and nine other pilots would target a railroad bridge about thirty-five miles to the north in the Sinanju region. Despite the fairly simple objective, the mission was a bit unusual. Colonel Robertshaw, MAG-33’s commanding officer, joined the formation as the mission’s tactical air coordinator, or “pathfinder.” Another high-ranking officer within the group, Lieutenant Colonel Harold G. Schlendering, flew on Robertshaw’s wing.
Although Colonel Robertshaw, Lieutenant Colonel Schlendering, Major Glenn, and Major Tom Ross each outranked him, Captain Jerry Hendershot led the mission. The twenty-five-year-old Hendershot had been flying missions for nearly five months. A captain leading multiple superior officers into battle was not uncommon. As far back as his time in the Marshall Islands, under the command of Major Pete Haines, Glenn had actually become accustomed to “this no-rank-in-the-air stuff.”
“The flight leader always had full authority, regardless of rank,” Tom Miller said years later. “But there are damn few captains who are going to object when a major says he’s going to do something.”
Unleashing a total of seventeen thousand pounds of GPs, the team blew a gaping hole in the targeted bridge as well as the road leading to it from the south. But Glenn wasn’t finished.
“I see that son of a bitch and I’m going after him,” he declared over radio.
Neither Hendershot, nor Schlendering, nor Robertshaw replied as Glenn swung around and returned to the area to tangle with a People’s Democratic Army anti-aircraft cannon. Fifty feet off the ground, he took out the enemy with his 20 mm cannons but, just as Tom Miller had warned, not before a 37 mm shell struck his plane.
“Boy, those anti-aircraft guys,” Glenn said years later. “I hated those bastards. They’re the natural enemies of fighter pilots, just like pitchers were Ted’s natural enemies.”
The explosive shell mushroomed out the metal in his tail’s horizontal stabilizer, damaging the plane’s elevator tab and making it difficult to ascend. At four hundred knots, the Panther nosed over and nearly crashed into a rice paddy embankment. But Glenn remained calm, announcing over radio, “I’m going to ease out of here.” (To his fellow 311 pilots he admitted that was the closest he had yet come to “buying the farm.”) Without the aid of hydraulics, Glenn used all his strength and yanked on the stick with enough force to pull the plane up and out of danger.
“Took two hands to manhandle that beauty most of the time,” he wrote to Annie. “Could hold it with one arm but the arm sure got tired. Got to about 6000 feet and then the fun really started.”
Seeing Glenn’s damaged Panther, Communist troops on the ground opened fire with additional anti-aircraft cannon, nicking the fuselage, nose, and his windshield with more shrapnel. In low visibility he was unable to rendezvous with the rest of the squadron but managed to reach a safe altitude for the 260-mile flight back to base.
“That’s a small sweat until you’re back over friendlies,” he wrote. “Keep wondering just how long that thing is going to run and what you’ll do when she stops.”
A crowd at K-3 gathered near the runway to watch Glenn descend from thirty-two thousand feet and land with far less drama than Ted Williams had a few weeks earlier at K-13. The ground crew helped him out of the Panther then surveyed the damage to his plane. With a cantaloupe-sized hole, and several other piercings, the entire tail would need to be replaced.
That night, at the desk inside his windy, chilly tropical hut, Glenn sat down to write up his recollection of the events in metered rhyme:
’Twas up Sinanju way one day,
In Indian Country, deep
To cut a bridge was our desire
Then rendezvous we’d keep
The sky was blue, no flak in sight
As we began our run,
High speed approach, all in good form
Then peeled off one by one.
The run began, the bridge loomed big
With mil lead fifty-five
A perfect day, and easy flight
’Twas great to be alive
Then off to one side of the tail
A tracer stream did pass,
A thought ran flashing through my mind
“They’re shooting at my (censored)”
I’ll note that wily devil’s spot,
To him I will return,
The nerve of him to shoot at me,
Just cause his bridge I’d burn,
So sweeping wide at end of run,
And noting landmarks clear,
I held the Panther Jet on the deck,
To sneak up on his rear,
About this time, right on the deck,
And throttle open wide,
